Amsterdam as Source of Symbols

7/28/2019 Amsterdam as Source of Symbols

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ADRIAN VAN DEN HOVEN AND BASIL D. KINGSTONE,UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR

Amsterdam as a source of symbols for Camus' The Fall*Albert Camus (1913-00) wrote, among other works,

three novels, known in English as The Stranger(1942), The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956). Theftrst two are better known in English than the third,and yet the third in many ways is the mostinteresting. All are frrst-person narratives and allprotest against a world in which people insist onjudging and condemning others, in other wordsagainst legalized killing. But there the resemblanceends.

The Stranger is an account of how a young man inAlgiers, with no ambitions, in a dead-end job, driftsinto an acquaintance with a pimp and kills an Arab inself-defence. He is tried and condemned to death, notso much for killing as because he didn't cry at hismother's funeral. He learns to love the world eventhough it is absurd. The Plague is the diary of adoctor who takes part in the ftght against an epidemicof bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran. Inboth cases the narrative is straightforward and thereis little imagery. Perhaps, in The Strange r, a minorftgure, an old man who seems to hate his dog but isupset when it dies, can stand for the main characterwho says "everybody knows life isn't worth living"but who learns to love it just before he is guillotined.In The Plague, the epidemic represents all thebloodthirsty insanity that swept through Europe in the1930's and 1940's.

'flU! Fall is very different. The narrator is a formerParisian lawyer, who believed he was superior to therest of humanity and despised it. Then somethinghappened to reveal that he was flawed, and a lifelongbattle began in his mind between admission anddenial of the fact. He has ended up frequenting asailor's bar called the Mexico City, on the Zeedijk inAmsterdam, where he confesses himself at length tohabitues and tourists alike, then urges them to makea similar confession which will restore his convictionthat he is superior. For he fears that if he is not ftt tojudge others, he will be judged.

The narration is not straightforward; the narratorreveals only gradually the burden of guilt that hewishes to admit to. He is halfway through. his talebefore he brings himself to tell of the event thatshattered his self-image: he once, when crossing thePont-Royal in Paris, f ~ e d to prevent a young womanfrom drowning. .

I had aiready gone some fiftyyards whenI heard the sound, which, despite thedistance, seemed dreadfully loud in themidnight silence. of a body .striking thewater. I stopped short, but without turningaround. Almost at once I heard a cry,repeated several times, and goingdownstream; then it suddenly stopped. Thesilence that followed, as the night suddenlystood still, seemed interminable. I wanted torun and yet didn't stir. I was trembling, Ibelieve from cold and shock. I told myselfthat I had to be quick and I felt anirresistible weakness steal over me. I haveforgotten what I thought then. "Too late, toofar .. " or something like that. I stoodmotionless and listened. Then slowly,in therain, I walked away. I didn't report it toanybody (70).tAfter that, the narrator moved to Amsterdam,

where, in order to handle the guilt aroused in him bythe drowning, he wraps himself in symbols drawnfrom his surroundings. Even his name and address aresymbolic. He claims his name is Jean-BaptisteClamence, but soon admits it isn't. Obviously we areto think of St. John the Baptist, the voice crying. inthe wilderness, vox clamant s in deserto. Not onlythat, he lives

in the Jewish quarter, or what was called sountil our Hitlerian brothers made room.What a clean-up! Seventy-five thousandJews deported or assassinated; that is a realvacuum-cleaning.( .. ) I live on the site of


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Amsterdam in Camus' The Fall 35consists in occasionally, withoutdoffing their broad-brimmed hats,taking anatomy lessons? You arewrong. True, they walk next to us,and yet, note where their heads are:in that fog compounded of neon,gin and mint emanating from thegreen and red electric signs.Holland is a dream, sir, a dream ofgold and smoke, smokier by day,more gilded by night. And nightand day this dream is peopled withLohengrins like these, dreamilypassing by on their black bicycleswith the tall handle-bars, funerealswans who float withoutinterruption throughout the land,around the seas, along the canals.They dream with their heads in thecopper-coloured clouds and goround and round; they pray,sleepwalkers in the fog's gildedincense; they are no longer here.They have left for Java, the faraway island, thousands ofkilometres away. They pray tothose grimacing gods fromIndonesia with which they havedecorated their shop windows, andwhich at this moment are floatingabove us before alighting likesumptuous monkeys on the signsand the stepped roofs, to remindthese nostalgic colonisers thatHolland is not only the Europe ofmerchants but also the sea, the seathat leads to Cipango and to thoseislands where men die mad andhappy (13-14).

In this passage one function of the style is tocapture both sides of Holland's past, in as succinct amanner as possible: Rembrandt and the Dutch EastIndies company, the Dutch reputation as both hardnosed realists and wistful dreamers. But we must notforget that it is only on the surface of the text andthrough the voice of the narrator that these elementsof Holland's paSt become distinct realities, and onlythere do they create an evident and coherent pattern.Without the narrator's purposeful intervention, themetonymic relationship between the images and

Holland's glorious and inglorious past would notbecome evident. The passage may thus be seen as "aperfect copy" of Holland's past, in the same mannerthat the van Eyck panel presently displayed in Ghent'sSt. Bavo Cathedral can be seen as a perfect copy ofthe panel hidden in Clamence's cupboard.But the other f u n ~ i o n of this, as of all the lyricalor frenzied o u t b u r s ~ , is to reveal that Clamence,spurred on by gin and bad faith, is denying reality.The romantic image is immediately followed byanother, no less literary, but not at all golden:Have you noticed that Amsterdam'sconcentric canals resemble the circles ofhell? The bourgeois hell, naturally, peopledwith bad dreams. When one comes from theoutside, as one passes through these circles,life, and hence its crimes become denser,darker. Here we are in the last circle. Thecircle of the ... (14).

His interlocutor immediately recognizes the referenceto Dante's Inferno and the traitors' circle; but the factthat the sentence is left incomplete provides us witha hint of that other layer of verbal reality that herequires us to explore, because for Clamence nothingis simple and straightforward. one must dig deeperand deeper until fmally one arrives at "the heart ofthings" (ibid).He develops this image when he and his listenervisit Marken. On the shore of the Zuiderzee heexclaims:

Look to our left at that heap of ashes thathere they call a sand dune, the grey dyke onour right, the livid beach at our feet and infront of us the sea, the colour of diluteddirty water from the laundry, and the vastsky with the pale water reflected in it [sic].Really a soggy hell. Nothing but horizontallines, no brightness, space is colourless, lifeis dead (72).This place may be taken as a physical correlativeof Clamence's own mind. He has chosen to hide inthis place because he can keep his mind in a fog. Hecontrasts it with the Mediterranean (97-98), with itsclear skies and unhypocritical people. We can tell thathe could never bear to see himself with such clarity.


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36 Canadian Journal of Netherlandic StudiesHe gives the Usselmeer its old name on purpose: it isthe opposite of the Mediterranean, which for aEuropean is the true southern sea.

Indeed, Amsterdam and the Zuiderzee are not onlya good place for a personality like Clamence's: theyreflect his personality. He says of the area that

The newspaper readers and fornicators [i.e.modem men] can go no further. They comefrom allover Europe and come to a haltaround the inner sea, on the drab beach (15).

These terms recall the polar lake reached at the endof another unsatisfactory inner voyage, Gide's LeVoyage d'Urien (1893). "It was the end, you could gono further." A critic has called Gide's self, as it ishere presented, circumscribed, lonely and empty.2

Under the golden misty illusion, then, lurkssomething far grimmer, namely the complex andnever pure nature of humanity. Clamence constantlyspeaks of (and demonstrates) the cagey subtlety, thecynical complexity but also the blatant gruesomenessof human behaviour. For example, he points out ahouse:

Charming house, isn't it? The two heads yousee up there are those of Negro slaves. Ashop sign. The house belonged to a slavetrader. Ah! In those days, one didn't hideone's game. They had guts, they announced:"There, this is my business, I trade in slaves,I sell back flesh." Can you imagine someoneto-day letting it be known publicly that suchis his profession? (44)Clamence is not condemning Holland's past

commercial practices, however: he is speaking of thepresent. He wishes to stress that modem man is notmorally superior but that he has simply become morehypocritical and clever at hiding his true occupations.We cloak our motives with good intentions, we tumour backs on whatever is hideous or vicious. Camushimself is here making an attack on Sartre and hisoft-stated belief that one is always responsible forone's actions, asserting that the latter's notion ofhuman psychology is far too simplistic.3 Of course weare involved, but we also spend the majority of ourtime and effort in hiding our responsibility or lookingthe other way while piously proclaiming our

innocence. Let us provide another example. Sometime later Clamence points to another Amsterdamlandmark:

Why, a few streets from here, there is amuseum called Our Lord in the Attic. At thetime, they had to put their catacombs underthe roof timbers. What do you expect, theirbasements are flOoded here (115).

The historical origins of this Catholic church, "Ons'Lieve Heer op Solder," are well known. During theReformation, it permitted Catholics to hear Mass inssecret. Clamence refers to this landmark to establisha somewhat spurious link with Roman times and itspersecution of Christians but, more importantly, itallows him to highlight modem man's attitude:

But to-day - set your mind at rest - theirLord is neither in the attic nor in thebasement. They have hoisted him onto ajudge's bench, in the secret of their hearts,and they smite, they judge above all, theyjudge in their name. He spoke softly to theadulteress: "Neither do I condemn thee!" butthat doesn't matter; they condemn withoutabsolving anyone (ibid).

Of course the real Christ is not in their hearts.Modem man simply uses his Ten Commandments tojudge and condemn others. He has no intention ofleading a truly virtuous life; on the contrary, laws arebut grist for his mill, to be used to better grind upothers and exonerate himself.

One last quotation, to bring out the reason why theidea that Amsterdam is an unreal city is not in fact arosy idea. As so often, he is proposing a self-analysis,but he speaks again of the Dutch:

Thus the surface of all my virtues had a lessimposing underside... To be sure, Ioccasionally pretended to take life seriously.But very soon the frivolity of seriousnessstruck me and I merely went on playing myrole as well as I could... In short there's noneed of going on, you have already graspedthat I was like my Dutchmen who are herewithout being here: I was absent at themoment when I took up the most room. Ihave never been really sincere .. (85-88).


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Amsterdam in Camus' The Fall 37Clamence's sincerity is a game, a fonn of shadowboxing. His behaviour is designed to feign, toimpress, to persuade, while in the meantime he isreally absent. The image of the Dutch as a people"with their heads in the clouds", at once down-toearth burghers and dreamers of far-away tropicalIndonesia, therefore suits Clamence perfectly. Itbrings us to our fmal question: what to make of hisuse of the Lowlands?

For, as we said above, Clamence wraps himself insymbols drawn from his surroundings; he no moredescribes the surroundings than he honestly analyzeshimself. The reader constantly stumbles overdifferences between the real world and Clamence'sversion of them, Most of Amsterdam's inhabitants donot move around in a dream (13-14). At one point hesays he does not cross any bridges on his routebetween the Jordaan and the Zeedijk; in fact he couldnot help doing so. To say, as he does, that Ons' LieveHeer op Solder is in the attic because in the basementit would be flooded (115), is silly. Perhaps it issimply easier to hide in attics (one thinks of AnneFrank, of course). He says the house that shelteredDescartes has been turned into a lunatic asylum, butit certainly wasn't one at the time when this noveltakes place. He speaks of hearing foghorns indowntown Amsterdam; you cannot. He speaks of atide on the Zuiderzee; since it became the I1sselmeerthere is no tide. At Marken he speaks of a beach andsand dunes (72); there are neither (the dunes are onHolland's west coast). There is certainly no beach inAmsterdam (15).

We can see The Fall as a palimpsest or, better yet,a hologram. What Camus has succeeded in doing isto use real places - Amsterdam's lay-out in a series ofconcentric circles, as well as its canals and its people,along with a real painting stolen from St. Bavo'sCathedral in Ghent - as a means of bringing out man'smulti-faceted, complex and treacherous nature.However, The Fall requires us not only to have athorough knowledge of Dutch life and culture, butalso to integrate these aspects with the multipleintertextual games that Clamence indulges in.Amsterdam's concentric circles remind Clamence ofDante's Inferno, the Zeedijk reminds him of Hell's lastcircle. His name has blatant Biblical overtones and hisdescription of the Dutch draws on Rembrandt andBaudelaire.

The stolen panel from van Eyck's triptych forcesthe reader to deal with multiple perceptual andteleological questions. First of all, the panel nowresides behind a closed cupbOard door in Clamence'sapartment. In other words, the real panel is usuallyinvisible and only Clamence, his listener, the "gorillalike" bar owner and we the readers "know" of itswhereabouts. Instead what most people get to seewhen they visit SaintBavo's Cathedral in Ghent is "aperfect copy", a simulacrum. This implies that whathuman beings show each other of themselves is alsobut a fake, a "perfect" copy, and hardly ever "the realthing". In addition, there is the empty rectangle which. s displayed on the bar wall above and behind "thegorilla". It refers at the same time to the "gorilla's"mind or soul, which is a blank, to the real panelhidden in Clamence's cupboard, to the triptych inGhent, and to man's real intentions, which so oftenremain enigmatic. Let us add that on the back of "TheJust Judges" there is another painting, a portrait of the

~ . who commissioned the triptych - but inClamence's cupboard he is hidden. Since we can onlyever see one side of the panel, this man is in the samerelationship to the front of the painting as the listeneris to Clamence, the narrator, and as in tum Clamence,who is only "a voice on paper", is to the "tangible"and "visible" author, Albert Camus.

Yet Clamence is an essential guide both for theinvisible and inaudible listener and for us, the readers.In textual terms, he may be a disembodied entity, butwe are supposed to accept him as a real person whois living in a real city, Amsterdam. Yet however realAmsterdam and the Low Countries may be, it is whatClamence points to and reveals for us that isimportant. It is not just what we see and know thatmatters, but also what remains hidden and requiresClamence's guiding voice and interpretation.Ultimately, what Camus is proposing through hisintermediary is a much more sophisticated, complex,involved and slippery conception of human behaviourthan what he sees as Sartre's somewhat simplisticnotion of commitment. Camus clearly implies that wemust look beyond the man's rhetoric and posturingand investigate what is not given, "absent", and henceremains unstated in people's stances.

In conclusion, there are always things going onbehind our back and enigmas are an integral part ofman's attitude and behaviour. I f this means that thereis no such thing as a complete, definitive picture of


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38 Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studiesreality, so be it. But it also means that we are obligedto take into account the absent, "other" unmentionedaspects, and that we should always look behind ourback, behind the picture, to see what the reverse sidelooks like. Otherwise we will always be limitedexclusively to the obverse side of life, and what isobverse is so obvious as to be superficial, and thatapproach leads us straight into a hall of mirrors.Camus wants us to do more, namely to focus also onthe seemingly absent and to maintain the distinctionbetween the real and the fake and deliberately includeall sides of the picture.NOTES* We thank Henry Schogt of the University ofToronto for his valuable suggestions.I A. Camus: The Fall, tr. Justin O'Brien, new York:Vintage Books, 1956. We have modified thistranslation in places.2 Gide: Romans, recits, soties, oeuvres lyriques, Paris:Gallimard (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade), 1958, p. 64.The critic is Germaine Bree: Andre Gide,l'insaisissable Protee, Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1953,p.55.3 Some critics take the opposite view, namely thatCamus feels Sartre and his circle are guilty of badfaith, rmding devious reasons to judge and condemnothers even as they claim to be confessing their ownerrors. And indeed, in his diary he calls them judgepenitents, (cf. for example P. Ucollier in Dictionnairedes litteratures de langue /ran raise, Paris: Bordas,1984, 1:361). Yet Camus so obviously enjoys thelyrical crazy passages he puts in Clamence's mouththat he is surely not distancing himself completelyfrom his character's views. They are at least illiberalreactionary selfish feelings we all have to fight down.

Amsterdam as Source of Symbols

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